Jenyfer Matthews

One of the perks of working at the library is being able to borrow books, some of which I stumble across as I’m re-shelving the returns. I just finished reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (2001), a book I first found last spring while it was on reserve for a class. I thumbed through the foreword while working at the circulation desk and was hooked from the first paragraph so of course I grabbed it last week when I found it back in regular circulation.

As fascinating as The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Fast Food Nation book is not about calories and fat content and reporting how unhealthy fast food is. It’s a dense read, each paragraph – each sentence – is simply brimming with information, starting with the history of fast food restaurants in the post World War II period. A classic example of the American dream, the men behind these modern empires started out with next to nothing but an idea and managed to take the idea of cheap food and kitchen efficiency to startling new levels.

But that’s just the beginning. The book goes on to describe how once these new restaurants took hold and gained popularity, they had a tremendous impact on farming, ranching, and meat packing industries. So voracious was the fast food industry’s appetite for potatoes and beef that the only way for the agriculture industry to keep up was to themselves apply many of those same principals of efficiency to their own products in an effort to keep up with the demand.

You might assume that with such high demand would come higher prices, but it didn’t happen that way in farming. In an effort to keep up and make more money, each farmer worked independently to produce a greater yield. So successful were they that it drove prices down. Of course it’s not that simple either – over the years huge agro-companies have grown to mammoth proportions and diversified, crushing individual farmers and ranchers in the process.

What made this book so interesting to me was not only the lesson in national economics but the human casualties in the industrialization of such large sectors of American society, starting with the people who work in the restaurants. The fast food industry typically only pays minimum wage and has actively (and successfully) fought any increases in minimum wage for years in an effort to keep their profit margins higher. And who usually works at these jobs? Unskilled workers, often teenagers, but also recent (or illegal) immigrants, all of whom are vulnerable members of society. Restaurant managers often receive annual bonuses for keeping labor costs low and they have established methods to do so. At best they “stroke” an employee, giving them praise and inculcating a feeling of being an important member of the team to manipulate employees into agreeing to work longer than their scheduled shift, with no extra pay. At worst, managers have been caught deliberately scheduling shifts to start and stop at busy times, forcing workers to stay over time during the rush, again with no extra pay.

Parallel situations have developed at slaughterhouses and meat packing plants as well. In an effort to maximize profits, the line speeds in both slaughterhouses and meat packing plants have increased – a dangerous practice from both the perspectives of the workers who are often injured by the knives they wield and the machinery they work with but also for the end consumer who may well end up with tainted products as a result of poor safety practices. Meat packing used to be a fairly skilled and highly paid profession. With industrialization, the big businesses have turned it into just another assembly line job, paid the minimum they can get away with and staffed with unskilled workers who have few other choices. As you might expect, the injury rate at a slaughterhouse or meat packing plant is high – not only from lacerations or accidents with machinery but also from repetitive stress injuries. Plant managers often receive bonuses based on low injury rate so many injuries go unreported on any official records.

If the working conditions of the people don’t move and disgust you, let’s move on to the animals. Aside from the much less than humane treatment they receive in the industrial feedlots, what the cattle are fed is horrifying. Cattle are ruminants and as such are intended to eat a variety of grasses. In feedlots they are fed whatever will fatten them up the fastest. In the past that list has included livestock wastes such as the remains of dead sheep and dead cattle and millions of dead cats and dogs purchased from animal shelters until the FDA banned such practices in the wake of fears over the spread of mad cow disease. Current regulations however still allow cattle to be fed dead pigs and dead horses as well as dead poultry, cattle blood, and waste products from poultry plants including sawdust and old newspapers that have been used as litter and which contain chicken manure, a source of dangerous bacteria, and parasites such as salmonella and tapeworms in addition to antibiotic residues, arsenic and heavy metals. (pp. 202-203).

What infuriated and disgusted me the most in this book was the underlying greed that was at the root of all of the worst practices in these industries. Here is a short list of examples that jumped out at me:

• No source of potential revenue goes unnoticed. In 1973, amid a bitter union organizing drive in San Francisco, the labor commissioner discovered and ordered a McDonald’s to stop accepting tips at its restaurants, since customers were being misled: the tips being left for crew members were actually being kept for the company.(p.76)

• Taxpayers are subsidizing the fast food industry’s high turnover rate. Through federal programs, fast food chains have claimed tax credits up to $2400 per each new low-income worker they hire. A 1996 investigation by the US Dept of Labor concluded that 92% of these workers would have been hired anyway and that their jobs were part-time, provided little training, and came with no benefits. The extremely high turnover rate in the industry simply means that the fast food companies can claim this credit for each new low income worker they hire. (p. 72-73)

• Pressure for ever increasing profits often drives companies to criminal activities. In 1989, ConAgra was found guilty of having systematically cheated chicken growers in Alabama: by tampering with trucks and scales and over an eight-year period 45,256 truckloads of full-grown birds were deliberately misweighed to make the birds seem lighter at ConAgra processing plants in the state. (p. 159)

• Meat processing plants deliberately recruit and exploit vulnerable groups. In September of 1994, GFI America, Inc. – a leading supplier of frozen hamburger patties to Dairy Queen, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store, and the federal school lunch program – needed workers for a plant in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It sent recruiters to Eagle Pass, Texas near the Mexican border, promising steady work and housing. The recruiters hired thirty-nine people, rented a bus, drove the new workers from Texas to Minnesota, then dropped them off across the street from People Serving People, a homeless shelter in downtown Minneapolis. (p. 163)

• The school lunch program in the US might be the most dangerous place to eat. A 1983 investigation by NBC News reported that the Cattle King Packing Company – at the time, the USDA’s largest supplier of ground beef for school lunches and a supplier to Wendy’s – routinely processed cattle that were already dead before arriving at its plant, hid diseased cattle from inspectors, and mixed rotten meat that had been returned by customers into packages of hamburger meat. Cattle King’s facilities were infested with rats and cockroaches. (p. 218)

• Just cleaning the meat isn’t the answer. Steven Bjerklie, the former editor of Meat & Poultry, opposes the idea of irradiation to sanitize meat because he believes it will reduce pressure on the meatpacking industry to make fundamental and necessary changes in their production methods and allow unsanitary practices to continue. “I don’t want to be served irradiated feces along with my meat,” Bjerklie says. (p. 218)

• Eating at home isn’t necessarily safer since the meat is still processed at the same places. Anyone who brings raw ground beef into his or her kitchen today must regard it as a potential biohazard, one that may carry and extremely dangerous microbe [e coli 157:H7], infectious at an extremely low dose. The current high levels of ground beef contamination, combined with the even higher levels of poultry contamination, have led to some bizarre findings. A series of tests conducted by Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, discovered far more fecal bacteria in the average American kitchen sink than on the average American toilet seat. According to Gerba, “You’d be better off eating a carrot stick that fell in your toilet than one that fell in your sink.” (p. 221)

In the end, I can’t help wondering why. Why is it so important to squeeze out every single penny in profit at such a high cost to the employees and to national health? These corporations make billions of dollars in profit every year, would it really hurt any one of them to ensure better working conditions for their employees and enforce stricter safety measures? To allow farmers and ranchers to make a decent living? To feed cattle grass instead of other dead animals and biohazardous trash? The politicians who are out there shouting their patriotic slogans and calling for tax breaks are the same ones who are in the pockets of these big companies and often benefiting tremendously from turning a blind eye or flat out ignoring what is really going on. With the franchising of these restaurants internationally, the US is not only exporting a business model and a type of food, but all of these associated injustices as well. I’m not suggesting that all fast food restaurants should all be driven out of business, just that as powerful as they are, they need to take more responsibility for the power they possess.

If all of that wasn’t enough to turn your stomach, think about this: the fast food industry deliberately markets its product to children. Not only so the children will push their parents into coming to the restaurants and spend money as frequently as possible (have to collect ALL those toys after all), but also so that they can inculcate brand loyalty at an early age and thus ensure the next generation of customers. Americans are already some of the fattest and unhealthiest people in the industrialized world. Somehow fast food doesn’t seem like such a bargain anymore.

It’s a bit early, but I put up the Christmas tree yesterday at the children’s insistence. And by “put up” I mean assemble. Since we moved to the Middle East we’ve made do with an artificial tree. You can actually get a “live” Christmas tree here in Cairo, depending on your definition of live. You could buy a large potted Norfolk pine or another sort of vaguely pine tree shaped evergreen shrub, neither of which have branches strong enough to carry large ornaments (and potted are nearly too heavy to move later on!) or you could spend several hundred dollars and get a cut spruce imported from Lebanon which is likely quite dry when it arrives.

Our artificial tree cost me about $20 and we’ve used it for three years. It’s good enough for now.

The best part of having the tree up is looking at all of the ornaments we’ve accumulated every year. I’m not one of those super color / theme coordinated tree decorators. I pick up ornaments as I see them, wherever I see them. Some are from the grocery store, some were from bazaars, some were gifts. A few I have made over the years, like these:

(click image to enlarge)

This one is roughly 3″x3″ and is a tiny quilt block called Secret Garden (a variation on Cathedral Window). It’s based on fabric folding rather than sewing so it’s a fun take-along project. This one was an “assignment” by a friend in a former quilt group. She later taught me to make Cathedral Window blocks and I have one row of what is intended to be a queen sized charm quilt for my daughter completed, oh, seven years later. I obviously need to take that one along more often!

This tiny stocking is filled with whole cloves and bits of cinnamon bark. I made them from fabric and batting scraps one year when I was participating in a craft sale at Christmas time and I wanted to have some smaller, impulse items to offer. I think they were the ONLY things that sold that year!

Looking at these ornaments has made me think that I really ought to make some salt dough and let the children make some ornaments over the school holiday. I think the same thing every year of course – but maybe this year I will actually do it!

The florists near my house are all awash in beautiful poinsettia as well and since all of my stragglers from previous years finally died while I was away this summer, I stopped on my way home from work at my favorite shop to pick up a couple more. I’m not sure why, but the guy who works there really likes me and the children. I only shop there half a dozen times a year but I walk past several times a week on my way other places and he often runs after me and hands me a flower. I indicated some poinsettia that were displayed on the sidewalk and the florist guy shook his head at me and said “no good” and gestured at me to follow him.

He took me around the building to a lean-to covered with a tarp and showed me yet more poinsettia and said they were better. They looked much the same to me and the price was the same so I said okay. It was only when I got home did I realize the difference. They are HUGE! I had intended to put one in the dining room but had to change that plan once I removed the first plant from it’s plastic sleeve.

I bought three of these monsters, all of which are now sitting floor level in our living room. They are gorgeous. I will have to go back and get some minis for the dining room. Or maybe that was his evil plan all along…

We do!

People often ask me what it’s like to celebrate holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas abroad. We manage just fine, I think. I suppose it really boils down to what your expectations of the day are more than anything else.

When we lived in the United Arab Emirates, the weekend was Thursday / Friday so Thanksgiving was never an issue – we always had the day off! The weekend in Egypt however is Friday / Saturday so there have been times when the children actually had to go to school on Thanksgiving. As it happens, this year Thanksgiving coincides with a Muslim holiday so EVERYONE in Egypt has a long weekend.

As my husband and children are vegetarian, we don’t cook a turkey, though they are available. I saw some giant frozen Butterball turkeys at the store the other day. Just thinking how much fossil fuel energy that turkey must have consumed to travel to all the way to Cairo is staggering, frankly. And I wouldn’t want to think about how many times it might have thawed just a bit on the way! But if you are really into your turkey, it is still probably worth the money. A neighbor of mine bought a local turkey one year and in the end was very disappointed. Turns out, the shop had sold her a rooster! They compensated her by giving her a Butterball after the fact, but that didn’t make up for the fact that they ruined her holiday meal.

On a normal day, I’m a one-pot meal kind of cook. On Thanksgiving, I go all out (for me, anyway!). I make a pumpkin pie, stuffing, mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy, cranberry sauce, a veggie (this year, steamed broccoli), and a lieu of a turkey we have lentil loaf. It’s a meal we all enjoy and since we only make it on the holidays, it’s all the more special.

There’s no Macy’s Day parade or football to watch, but the children don’t mind because Thanksgiving is when I finally lift the ban on watching Christmas movies

Whatever your plans for the holiday, I hope you have a great weekend.

The grocery store where I do the majority of my shopping is sort of controversial in my neighborhood. They carry a lot of imported items – at the expected mark-up – and have a reputation for being thieves. I buy a mix of local and imported and am willing to pay for the convenience of shopping there than elsewhere. Truly, I’ve done the comparison shopping and they aren’t so much more expensive than other shops are AND I can walk there. I just watch the cashier closely

They put up this sign in the last year, but I have yet to hear of anyone actually “getting lucky” in the mystery sale – in any sense of that phrase, ha ha! Until recently I’d been doing most of my shopping in the early mornings, but I’ve recently shifted to Saturday afternoons. Still no luck. I’m beginning to think that it’s (gasp!) all a big hoax!! I may have to do some sort of expose and call them on it. Maybe I’ll get 25% off my bill just to keep me quiet…

It’s that time of year again – November, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a time when a largish group of people decide that THIS will be the month that they write the novel that’s been lurking in their heads.

From the NaNoWriMo website:
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

It’s not a bad idea really, setting aside a specified amount of time and demanding a specific output. Quality aside, at least you have something to show for your effort at the end of the month. You can’t revise and edit a blank page after all.

I’m not participating in NaNoWriMo. Every year I find myself kind of seduced by the challenge, but wisely back away. Why set myself up to fail so spectacularly? I am the sort of writer who is lucky to write 50K words in a year, not a month. I feel bad enough when I fail to meet my own modestly set word count goals on a day to day basis.

Part of my problem is discipline – you can’t write if you aren’t sitting down and doing it. Yes, I’m busy. Everyone is busy. Other writers make time. What’s the difference between them and me? Who knows. But at least some of them have contracts to fulfill and deadlines to meet. It’s amazing what those things can do for your discipline. Being accountable only to myself isn’t really much of a stick. What’s the rush? The story is in my head – I pretty much know what is going to happen next. And if I don’t, then what’s the point in sitting down to write? My writing process is often like waiting on the next installment in a serial story. It comes in waves, with lulls in between.

I think that writing 50K words in one gush like that might work better with stories that are heavier on plot. First this happens, then that happens, then watch out! Big climax. Phew – we made it. Most of my stories are very character driven and even though I start out with a premise, the characters tend to reveal themselves as I go along – things happen that I didn’t really plan. I have *tried* to turn off the internal editor and get on with things, to speed things up, usually to no avail. I simply can’t move forward in the story until I feel like the emotional tone of the story up to the point I’ve written is what I mean for it to be. I might only go back and add one sentence or change one word in a scene, but for me that one sentence or word will make all the difference. If I don’t add it when it pops into my head, I will likely forget. (Though from time to time I have an idea of something to add / fix, only to discover I’ve already added it!)

It might take me months longer to finish a story, but on the other hand my first drafts tend to be very clean and require minimal editing. In the grand scheme it’s six of one, half-a-dozen of the other. The important thing is just to keep writing until The End.

Last night was the Halloween fair at the children’s school, the last big costume event for the season I hope! It had been unusually cloudy all day and even sprinkled a few times. The sky looked very ominous by late afternoon and I was sure we were all going to be drenched at the fair.

(Click image to enlarge)

In fact it didn’t rain – or if it did, it never reached the ground – and we had a good time at the fair. The children played games and collected their “spooky prize” at the end. My daughter got a jumping rubber bat, but was upset she didn’t get trick chewing gum like her brother. My son kindly traded with her. He got the better end of the deal though since the bat is still jumping but the trick gum has already broken.

When my daughter brought it to me for repair I got a good look at the label:

Not sure which is worse, the outside of the package or the inner warning label:



Don’t joke the sickman indeed. The translator for this was the sick one. I love the image of the tiny lips along with “no entrance”. I am fairly surprised the party organizers didn’t notice the label before distributing it to small children however. The children haven’t caught on but not all parents have a sick sense of humor like mine!

The gum is proving difficult to repair so I may just quietly dispose of it…

As a mother and an adult, there are few things that will push my buttons more effectively than a back-talking child. I’m not sure why exactly, because I myself am something of a smart-ass, but there is it. A quirk of human nature, do as I say not as I do. My own children seldom get away with it, but unfortunately I don’t have as much sway over other people’s children.

What I wonder is, why does anyone let a child get away with it? When I see the other children who participate in the tennis groups with my own children arguing with or talking back to the coach, it drives me crazy. Not only because it is generally disruptive to the atmosphere of the class but also because the mothers of these children are usually sitting there observing and not saying a word. Sometimes they are even smiling benevolently.

When I mentioned this phenomenon to an American acquaintance of mine, he sort of laughed and said that I was just used to the British system (since my children go to a British curriculum school). I was astonished by that comment – or was it an excuse? Why on earth would that have anything to do with anything? Does that imply that Americans expect and encourage bad behavior from children? That in trying to teach our children to be independent thinkers we are also encouraging them to be rude? I’m trying to raise my children to be independent thinkers AND good citizens. It’s not always an easy task, but I’m not super impressed with the sort of children that having lower standards produces.

I have been labeled a strict mother by more than one person, but I have also had glowing reports of my children’s behavior from both their schools and other parents when they go for a play date (home behavior is another story entirely) I guess if believing that my children are not my equal and that sometimes I do know better than they do and that exerting my authority over them when necessary makes me strict, so be it. At least I can send them out in the world and be (mostly) confident that they will behave themselves.

I had a post in mind for this weekend but in the end I just can’t find the mental energy necessary to sit down and write it. Maybe next week.

On the up side, after being off all of yesterday our water has been restored. It’s kind of astonishing how much water you use in the course of a day. Toilet flushing, hand washing, dishes, laundry, showers. After the time our water was off for five days in our first year in Cairo, I keep two 20 liter jugs in case of such outages. I ended up dipping into it yesterday to do a sinkful of dishes that the ants were getting a little too interested in. I heated a stock pot of water for the washing and ended up using about 5 liters of bottled water for a scant rinse. I hated to waste bottled water that way, but it was that or let the ants have a party in my kitchen. I did the dishes in a plastic tub and then used the dishwater to force the toilet to flush so it wasn’t totally a waste!

On the down side, now I get to spend the weekend catching up on all the laundry and other household chores I didn’t get to do while I was coaching my children through research projects, book reports, spelling practice, and math activities. I’m no neat freak, but I am happier when my house is reasonably tidy. I also have an ulterior motive: if I do all this housework now, when everyone is home and I won’t have any me-time anyway, I can do whatever I like for five whole days next week. MWHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Have a good weekend. I’m counting the hours until the children get on their school bus on Sunday…

It’s officially the weekend but we have no time off. My son is finished with his homework, but my daughter has miles and miles to go yet. We have to finish up a book report and finally make a start on the mammoth research project on the Tudors. She’s right at that perfect age where she’s a bit young to be left with such a project on her own, but just old enough that I don’t feel inclined to be too soft on her because I *know* that she can do more than she’s letting on. My primary job this weekend will be trying to convince her to work with me so that we can get this done efficiently. Fussing, fretting, complaining, and tears will only drag things out, not get her off the hook.

Her teacher this year is a bit of a performer – apparently he puts on costumes and uses voices and teaches them by entertaining them. It seems to work really well for him. At this point I’d put on a fat suit and pretend to be Henry the VIII if I thought it would speed things up!

Have a great weekend whatever you are up to!

Nope, not talking about Mommy-brain. I’m talking about remembering something fondly from the past and how you can’t always trust those memories.

Specifically, I remembered really, really liking The Thorn Birds when I was a child. I can remember watching the mini-series on TV and then much later reading and re-reading the book. I loved it. I wanted to move to Australia. I wanted Ralph and Maggie to get together (always the romantic!) Since it is still available in print 32 years later, I must not be the only one who enjoyed the book. So when Amazon sent me an email advertising a sale on TV series DVDs I thought why not?

I really should have known better.

Admittedly, given my schedule lately, I’ve only had time to watch the first episode. But having watched the first episode, I’m not especially interested in going on. I kind of want to preserve my good memories of the series. Yet, those memories have already been compromised by the shallow characterizations and poor acting / directing that I’ve already seen. Nothing is subtle, it’s as if the director and the script writer were afraid to trust the viewer to catch on to the nuances of the storyline without slapping her across the face with it. What seemed so dramatic and captivating in 1983 seems pretty unsophisticated by today’s standards.

Add to that none of the characters save one, who are all supposed to be Irish living in Australia, has the appropriate accent AND the icky factor of a priest obsessed with a small child and it’s pretty much a matter of willpower to go on and finish the thing. I keep hoping I’ll get sucked in to the storyline like I did all those years ago, but it’s tough to do when my husband (who is watching it for the first time) keeps bursting out laughing.

When will I ever learn?